Let's face it. SOAP is painfull. It's a dumb idea, the only reason you should ever consider using SOAP is if someone holds a gun to your head or pay you a lot of money for it.

As anyone with experience in commercial software development knows, both of these situations will unfortunately occur rather frequent, so this module is an attempt to reduce the pain involved with simple use cases. It is not an attempt to cover every possible situation, but considering that the most trivial uses of SOAP in perl today involves goat sacrifice, I hope that it may help some people.

This module is a wrapper around XML::Compile::SOAP which is a much more complete module, but has an API that can be difficult to use and not to mention integrate in other solutions. That being said; If this module does not suit your needs, I strongly recommend you have a look at XML::Compile::SOAP or SOAP::WSDL. Many SOAP services simply are buggy or incomplete. They will not work with this module no matter how hard you try because the WSDL is invalid in some way (It is remarkably easy to end up with a bad WSDL when trying to create a SOAP service. Java and .NET services tend to be especially nasty). To be able to work with these services, you need to hand code parts or even the complete interface, something which I intentionally do not want to support with this module. This module is aiming to be a simple module for simple cases where you can find a good WSDL file.

Constructs an instance with methods found in the $wsdl. The wsdl argument may be an XML::Compile::WSDL11 object, or anything that module accepts. This does not currently include the url to a WSDL file, but this will be implemented in this wrapper in the future.

The methods generated for the SOAP interface takes perfectly normal perl structures like scalars, hashes, and lists, and converts them into whatever data type the SOAP service expects you to provide it with. The same is the case for what you get in return, but keep in mind that while you do get a perl structure, just how it looks varies a lot from service to service.

If you or the server violate the WSDL in any way, you will be given a message by XML::Compile::SOAP description what it perceives to be the problem. As stated earlier, keep in mind that many SOAP services can be very ugly to deal with and if you keep getting error messages that you are unable to correct, you probably want to have a look at other SOAP modules as this module intentionally doesn't have the neccesary flexibility to get around buggy SOAP services.

This module tries to take adventage of the possibilities that Moose has to offer without abusing them violently like certain other modules (Several found in the MooseX namespace) has done. If this section does not make any sense to you, don't worry, you don't need to understand anything here in order to use this module.

It implements a metaclass trait called SOAP::Simple::Trait which adds an add_wsdl method to the module metaclass. This method takes the exact same arguments as the constructor method for SOAP::Simple, but simply just adds the methods found to the class instead of spitting out a new instance. This is also where all the real work is done and the other modules are pretty much just convinience wrappers around this trait.